I dream of dog death. Every night for weeks sometimes. It comes in spells, dog dreams and then nothing. Back when I was a kid, my uncle Chris bred bullies and boxers. He fed stray mutts too and kept a blind teacup poodle that was forever falling off the front porch. The one that bit me was a chow mix. Bit me square in the ass. I was down at the pond fishing. Chris saw the whole thing and he shot the dog before I made it up to the house. He called its name and it looked up at him just as the shot came. Chris wanted to test it for rabies. He had to send bits of the brain in to the county lab but it was Fourth of July weekend. He didn’t have a freezer so he brought the head to Dad. Mom was mad but she made room between the venison steaks. That night I snuck out of bed and down to the chest freezer. The head was wrapped in plastic IGA grocery bags, layers of them. The hair was dusty and soft behind the ears. The eyes were open, looking up to see what it was Chris wanted of him.
Now it’s twenty-five years later and I’m sitting here in Preacher Jackson’s office, waiting for him to show up, and I start thinking about that head again. I feel the soft fuzz of that dog’s fur between my fingers and then I hear the door at the end of the hall open. I smell Jackson before I can see him, cigarette smoke that coils down the hall and mixes in with the scent of the flooded river outside. I hear him walk past the community kitchen and the lady’s prayer circle room, his boots tic-ticking like rain, and as soon as he steps into the office, I can see that he has turned.
“I told them you’d make one last run,” he says, cigarette clamped between his teeth. “Tomorrow night.”
“Last run?” I say, and my voice sounds all sissy.
Jackson adjusts his shirt so that the butt of his .38 shows, sticking up out of the waist of his pants. I look higher, up to his eyes, but they are flickering from place to place.
His lips make a movement like a grimace or maybe a smile. “I know from thy works, that thou art neither cold nor hot,” he says. “I would thou wert cold or hot. So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spew thee out of my mouth.”
“Revelations, 3:15,” I answer and my stomach loosens up a bit. Jackson trained me to trade quotes since I first started going to his church eighteen years back. He trained me to preach too and later to mule.
“They need to talk with you.” He pauses and my brain leaps, but it is not the words of the Lord that he speaks. “John,” he says, running his hand through his white hair, “I don’t know whether to believe it was you that narced or not.”
He sits down on the corner of the desk. I tilt my chair as far back as it will go.
Jackson takes his .38 out and starts cleaning it. This is not the first time he’s pulled this kind of shit with me. He’s one of those freaked-out fuckers, has a whole arsenal of assault weapons, just making sure he survives till Judgment Day. Last year he called me into his office and sat here oiling his Glock and telling me he didn’t want me preaching at His Beautiful Blood no more. He said his congregation deserved better than to listen to the two-faced testifying of some common drug runner. I probably should of asked myself why I’d keep working for him after that, why I’d trust him.
I swivel my chair around to face Jackson.
“I told them you’ll show up and they can do whatever they need to,” he says. “It can’t be avoided. You don’t make that drop at The Lightning Club by midnight Tuesday, I’m heading straight for Billy’s door.”
He stands, pushes the .38 into his waistband and turns toward the hall. The desk chair tips back and my pulse flutters.
◆
Through the window of Slattery’s Bar, I see my little brother Billy pull into the lot. I know it’s him before he even parks his squad car. There are only five men on the Render police force. Only three who work the night shift. Only one who would bother to locate me in the middle of a two-hundred-year flood.
It isn’t raining right now but we all know it’s coming again; we can feel it, hear it already practically. It’s been raining for the past nine days straight, stopped sometime last night. This morning I left Celia lying in bed. When I stepped out the front door, I could feel the whole town concentrated on keeping the water away. Standing on my front stoop I felt the collective will power of the old timers down by the boarded-up train station, checking their watches for the 9:55 out of Clifton Forge, the teenagers taking their smoke breaks out back of the poultry plant, and the blue-hairs in Wilma’s Beauty Bath on Front Street, all of them praying the river down.
“John, you ready for another?” Sheila leans on her tiptoes, holding up the soda gun. I quit liquor but I haven’t quit the bar. It’s busy in here. I guess the water levels have everybody excited and wanting to be somewhere where they can holler advice at each other and feel okay about drinking tall boys instead of sitting at home with the kids.
Billy walks in the door, leaning on his cane and favoring his left leg.
“Sheila baby,” I holler. “A beer for the devoted lawman.”
Billy shakes his head and holds his hand up like he’s directing traffic. “No drinks for me, Sheila.”
Billy is a good cop through and through, from the tip of his pecker to the marrow of his bones. I know he doesn’t like all the kickbacks and turning blind eyes that goes on over at the police department, but Jackson already had an arrangement with the Render cops long before Billy got his badge.
“Hey John, come here.” Billy points towards our back booth.
I wonder just how many of these conversations Billy and I have had in this exact place. Used to be me counseling him but that changed up real fast. Changed for good when he came to pick me up from Parris Island; drove my Chevelle and came to fetch me after that fat fucking sergeant kicked me out for “distribution of pornography on base.”
“I don’t know what you did exactly.” Billy wipes the sweat off his glass of Mr. Pibb. “But I know those guys in Charleston got DEA crawling all over them though and they need somebody to blame.”
I watch Billy fidget. He won’t ever look at me when we have our booth talks. He looks instead at his hands, folding his scarred fingers together on top of the wooden table. Billy’s war wounds are still visible, welts all across his knuckles and palms, but his hands are steady, all laced together and prayerful. He ought to of been the one to be a preacher, not me. But that’s one of the few professions that Billy never followed me into. Surprising he didn’t give it a shot. Billy had a taste for succeeding where I failed: Marine Corps, police academy.
“Don’t make that run tonight,” he says.
I sip my Coke. “You ever given any thought to preaching?” I ask. “I think you’d make a real good fisher of men.”
Billy reaches into his shirt pocket and pulls out a slip of yellow paper. He slides it across the table towards me. “Mike Baker, I trained with him at Parris Island,” he says. “He’s a border patrol agent now, says he’s got a job waiting for you.”
The paper is upside down but I can make out words that spell something like Mereho, Texas. I glance up at Billy and in the clouded light of the dusty windows I swear I see Jackson standing behind him, Jackson’s fat fist slamming against Billy’s apartment door.
“It’s all arranged,” Billy says and pushes the scrap of paper closer to me. I smile and shake my head. I like that Billy thinks it could be that simple. I want to reach over and touch his fingers. Despite the burn scars, his knuckles look chubby and indented as a child’s, the gold band so smooth and well placed there.
Billy finally let me baptize him the week before he married Theresa. The wedding wasn’t at His Beautiful Blood though, they had it at Old Stone Presbyterian. Billy never did like Jackson. First time I ever met him, Billy was with me, only a couple of weeks after Daddy died. Mom was trying out churches, dragging us to different congregations every Sunday. It wasn’t Mom that Jackson wanted to talk to after the service though. It was Billy and me. The Sunday I baptized him it had been raining. The river wasn’t high as it is now but it was muddy, copper-colored. I know Jackson said it didn’t make a bit of difference but I always hated baptizing folks when the water wasn’t clear.
“Celia’s waiting for you,” Billy says. “I told her to have your stuff packed.”
I look at his fingers again. “You’ve got the preaching type hands,” I say.
He pulls his fingers back and hides them in his lap.
I swallow the last drops from my glass and suck the ice cubes down too. “Maybe you don’t have the charisma,” I say. “Preaching does take a fair amount of charisma.”
“Mike gave me his word.” Billy looks straight at me. “You show up and he’ll put you to work, help you and Celia find a place to stay.”
He stands then, adjusts his holster and walks away from me. He leans heavy on his cane and I wonder if his leg still hurts. I never give too much thought to Billy’s pain, guess I’ve always seen the cane as just a part of the war hero role, like the Purple Heart they pinned on his chest.
When I seen the second dog Chris killed, Billy was with me. We heard the shot in the night, me and Billy, one single shot. There was something wrong about that, the one shot, after midnight. I couldn’t sleep and across the room I saw Billy thrashing in the sheets. We got up together without ever talking about it and walked across the field to the barn where the light was shining. She lay right there at Chris’s feet and Chris was crying, his whole body heaving. We stayed in the dark for a long time with the sweet smell of silage and the sound of Chris crying and the bulldog, collar still on, at his feet, like she’d been sitting for a treat and then toppled over.
“How much do I owe you, Sheila?” Billy pulls out his wallet.
Sheila turns away from the TV screen. “For your soda? You don’t owe me nothing.”
I follow Billy up to the bar. He lays two dollar bills on the counter and leans towards the T.V. where the announcer shouts out water height numbers like some overzealous sports broadcaster…at fifteen feet and rising, the Milk River’s approaching the moderate flood stage... the ground saturation and rainfall quantity have pushed the dam to its limit… The screen cuts to a shot of the Cornstalk Dam, a churning deep brown slush.
“Then why the hell did they bother to build it?” Sheila asks.
“No, it’ll hold,” Billy says, “it was built for this kind of weather.”
Billy worked on the Cornstalk Dam ten years back. So did I. I lasted three days. He lasted two years; stayed till it was done and they plastered his shit-eating-nineteen-year-old grin across the front page of the paper: Local Boy Proud to Take Part in Monumental Dam Project.
…reaching maximum capacity, the spillway has been breached… The man on the T.V. huddles under a blue umbrella. The rain has not stopped in the northern counties.
Working on the dam was hot and exhausting and underpaid. I tried to take Billy with me when I left. He wouldn’t listen. Wanted to stay on. Daddy was a stayer too. He kept us up on Bethlehem Mountain in that moldy house, hitching a ride to and from work down in the slope mine every day.
When the T.V. cuts to a commercial for fabric softener Billy heads towards the door, fumbling with his cane, and something shakes up inside me, watching him move so slow like that.
“What’s it take to get a fucking drink around here?” I drop my glass on the countertop; the muscles in Sheila’s neck tense. She doesn’t just roll her eyes, she rolls her entire head, but pours me another Coke and leans way over as she hands it to me, all pressed up against the counter.
I tilt my glass up. Jackson said the rental car would be waiting in the church parking lot at ten p.m. and the clock nestled between the Tanqueray and Beefeater has just turned to eight.
…would it not be accurate to say that the Cornstalk Dam is, as of yet, untested at this level?… a man with oiled hair tilts his shiny face close to the camera.
I wonder if Jackson’s the one who tipped off the DEA. I know he’d be capable of it and I guess if the guys I meet each week at The Lightning Club were gone then there’d be space for him to move up.
…we cannot yet call it failure… a man with a plastic looking suit and a plastic looking smile shakes his head at the man with greasy hair …the spillways are full but the movement upriver determines the exact nature of the pressure…
◆
Outside, the evening has turned a soft dark color, night setting in and more clouds piled up over Birch Knob. I pull onto White Horse Road where mosquitoes hover thick over the blacktop.
Past the elementary school, the river bleeds up into the baseball field, a skim of brown water dotted with chip bags and soda cans. Five blocks down, the yellow brick county jail hunkers, evacuated already most likely. The last time I spent a night in there was right after Billy joined the force. Dave Jenkins hauled me in for selling .30 caliber pistols with no permit and I told him it was bullshit, called him a fudge-packer.
Billy walked up about halfway through the ordeal. Jenkins had me tied to the bars, two of my teeth loose, nose like a geyser. Billy stood there for a long while, looking squeaky clean in his new-issued uniform, until finally he’d called out, Hey Jenkins, take it easy, man.
I turn the truck around and drive out east, up Bethlehem Mountain. The road home, though it hasn’t been home in years, is familiar enough to navigate with no lights on. An owl swoops low over the windshield, eyes yellow and huge. I’ve only been back a few times since Mom sold the place, but I know what I’ll find.
The lane is rougher than usual with all the rain, deep gulches that could tear an axle if I turn the wheel wrong. I coast around the last curve and snap the headlights on high, watching the ghost walls and empty windows flicker up.
The people who bought our land were from up north, somewhere in New York. They were schemers; decided they’d throw up half a dozen matching bungalows and call it a gated community. They got three houses framed out before they gave up and failed. Bank seized the property and in the ten years since the buildings have just sat here, rotting.
I step out of the truck and kick around in what was once the front yard, my feet crunching over shotgun shell cartridges. Even after we moved to town, Billy and I came up for deer hunting. It’s been years though and I doubt the cartridges are ours. I light a cigarette and stare at the fallen-in houses, home to raccoons mostly, nestling birds.
Just before she told me she was selling the house, Mom finally let me have my own dog. Dad had been dead only a few months and she was feeling guilty I’d say. And the pup was pitiful. His mama was one of the strays Chris fed. She’d given birth out in the field, or maybe she’d given birth in the woods and got drug out into the field. Either way, me and Billy found her out past the powerline cut and she was just a mess of blood. The coyotes must of eaten all the other pups because there was just this one, eyes barely open, nosing his way through her guts and when he heard our voices he lifted his tiny head up, like it was a good idea to trust us.
My cigarette’s burned to the filter so I get back in my truck and drive down the mountain. Through my open window the river laps, a sucking, gurgling sound. The rain is still holding off but the current has spilled up onto the road at the intersection of Snake Run and Sinks Grove. My tires slice through, arcing up water that catches in my headlights and shines a spray of individual drops. I check my phone. 9:45. The night is quiet, no cars behind me. This is exactly why Jackson works out of the church; there is nothing else out here besides the houses of two old timers, both of them in bed with the lights out and hearing aids off by nine p.m.
The church glows pale against the shivering trees, but as soon as I pull around the corner, I know something is wrong. The rental is running, tail lights red, tinted windows closed and exhaust streaming out the tail pipe. I stomp on the brake and reach for the glove box. The rental, a champagne-colored Mazda, backs out of the Reserved Pastor Parking spot and turns, headlights blinding me. I grip my Glock, let the safety off as the car pulls around to my side and the window lowers. I blink in the bright lights and my eyes focus on the silver teeth of my brother.
“I can’t let you go up there,” Billy says.
“Fuck.” I’m still reeling from the sight of him. “No, man, you don’t understand—”
“You got that paper I give you earlier with Mike’s address?” He hollers. “Take Celia and Nathan and get on out of town.”
“No.” I bring my gun up level with the window. “Billy, fucking listen to me—”
But the car is gone. It squeals out of the lot and grinds downhill before I can even throw my truck in reverse.
“Fuck,” I scream again. With the shit he’s pulling we’ll both be dead soon.
I turn around and tail him down the mountain but he’s nothing but a dot of red lights through wet black trees. I jerk the wheel fast, skid on the steepest curve but keep gunning it. Ahead of me Billy takes the curves without braking and I laugh out loud. Fuck. Who knew he had it in him to drive like this? To pull some shit like this? I want to congratulate him even as I calculate the speed I’ll need to get close enough to flatten his tires with my Glock.
“Billy,” I holler, though he’s nearly half a mile ahead of me by then.
When we were babies the most fun I could have with Billy was scaring the living daylights out of him. We’d hitch a ride down off the mountain; kick around town trying to find somebody to buy cigarettes and liquor for us. Eventually we’d get bored and head over to the railroad tracks. Billy always wanted to hop the trains headed west but I never let us. The fun was in the danger of hopping the ones that snaked slow through the slope mine where our daddy worked. The fun was telling Billy, in a certain serious voice, how so-and-so lost their legs hopping trains, and so-and-so was taking a piss alongside the track, got his dick cut clean off. Billy ate up all my bullshit.
I step down on the gas harder, gaining on him as the night wind picks up and sends wet leaves in through my truck window. With a shudder, like a long exhale, the rain begins again. I turn the wheel and brake instinctively, fumbling for the wipers as the windshield smears before me.
Wipers on high, I gather speed, whip around the last curve on Sinks Grove Road and reach the intersection down by the old train bridge just in time to see the Mazda go airborne. Gleaming, waxed and shiny new, the little hatchback soars through the double bands of my headlights and on towards the black expanse of bloated river.
The nose slides into the water and the current flips Billy immediately, snaps the car’s back wheels up high. I’m out of the truck in one lunge, across the road and waist deep into the cold river. The water rips my legs out from under me. I sprawl, grasping and stumbling back into the shallows. The Mazda bobs like a bathtub toy, tires still spinning.
“Billy,” I scream, squinting at the windows, waiting to see his head emerge. The car dips twice, three times, and then something in that sucking stream rearranges itself and the Mazda drops. The shimmer of the tail pipe catches in my high beams and then all of a sudden it’s gone.
“Fuck you Billy,” I yell and dive into the muddy water.
In darkness and whip-shift-power the churning river pushes my head down. My legs buckle and my arms move slow. Through the brown water Billy’s hazy headlights glow but my body is slammed downriver faster than the Mazda. I’m losing it. Losing sense of top or bottom. My lungs burn but the headlights are still out there. I push, visualize every muscle, fiber and tendon and harness them together. The headlights blink; I tense and struggle. Arms wide, I pull against the stream but still I’m not moving and then something drops— slams into my chest— a tree stump or boulder set loose by the storm.
I reel in pain and tumble down, or up maybe. Too dark to see. My body takes over and tells me: air, air, air. The headlights are gone. I roar against the river, twist in the current and buck up into the night.
Air against my face. I fill my lungs full and grab—first nothing, then the slippery branch of a long willow. I cling, arms tight, legs pulling downstream, and squint across the water. The surface is unbroken.
Billy is alive down there, in the darkness under that smooth surface, his lungs stuttering, the pressure against the car windows too heavy to open them. He sits inside that locked box, not fifty feet from me, using up his last breathes of air.
The current tugs, waiting for me to slip up and I swear I see lights again, in the river just below me. The water will crush the windows eventually, or leave it a sealed coffin bobbing along the bottom. I readjust my grip on the willow branch as rain blows sideways, wetting and re-wetting my face. The wind is the only sound, coming down over Bethlehem Mountain, past the house our great granddaddy built, over the mirror smooth surface of the reservoir and its log-choked dam, around those curves of wet black asphalt I’ve driven fifty million times.
The wind cuts choppy into the broadening stretch of river and through the waves I see something moving towards me. Billy, my mind leaps, but it is just a rusted oil barrel trundling downstream; a barrel just like the ones out back of the Gas ‘N Go that Billy and I set up as poker tables on hot teenage nights. As my eyes adjust, I see that the current has already claimed our town; the red and orange awning from the Riverside Café, a plastic miner’s helmet, butt of a shotgun, chipped milk glass, snow angel figurine, reflections of yellow flashlight beams.
Folks come out onto their porches, shining lanterns at the heavy river and side-swiping rain. They stare off into the eddy and swirl, as if to stop all the damage with those little prying lights.